Speech recognition systems are used in various applications to allow people to provide speech commands to electronic devices, such as telephones and computers.
Speech recognition is also used for translation and transcription.
EP patent publication 1696338, published Aug. 30, 2006, titled “Individual Simultaneous Translator”, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a telephone that serves additionally as an automatic translator for speech in the surroundings of the telephone, as well as speech received over the telephone line. The translation is sounded to the user instead of the original.
Similar translators are described in GB patent publication 2421815, to O'Donnel, and US patent publication 2002/0181669 to Takatori et al., published Dec. 5, 2002, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
US patent publication 2006/0074623 to Tankhiwale, published Apr. 6, 2006, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes using speech recognition for automatic real time transcription of voice conversations over a communication network.
Image recognition is used in various applications.
US patent publication 2007/0081744 to Gokturk et al., published Apr. 12, 2007, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method of cataloging images based on image recognition.
Advertisement is a powerful method of enhancing business. In many cases it is desired to target advertisements to users having the most chances of being interested in the advertised product.
U.S. patent publication 2005/0234779 to Chiu et al., published Oct. 20, 2005, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method of targeting advertisements.
PCT patent publication WO 2007/026320 to Hemar Elad et al., published Mar. 8, 2007, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a computer client which identifies words in a call using speech recognition or identifies the gender of a speaker and accordingly targets advertisements. This publication also suggests identifying a tone, voice level or other emotion and controlling an avatar accordingly. The publication recognizes the problem of convincing people to allow targeted advertisement, and suggests that the call service be supplied on condition that the advertisements are viewed. This, however, limits the provision of advertisements to services in which the advertisements can substantially subsidize the communication costs.
U.S. provisional patent application 60/765,743, filed Feb. 7, 2006, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference, describes using a voice recognition engine to convert the content of a conversation between two parties into text, which is analyzed in order to select advertisements to be presented to users.
Not always, however, do these systems provide sufficiently targeted advertisements.
Another, more general, problem with advertisements is that people tend to ignore them. Even in cases in which they receive cheap or free services which include advertisements, people tend to ignore the advertisements. In addition, in some cases the services provided in exchange for receiving advertisements are too expensive, making the provision of the service for free non-economical.